PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 74, 24 September 1938, Page 29

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

The City Librarian has chosen "The House of Templemore," by Pat Lawlor, as the book of the week, and has furnished the following review:

Mr. Lawlor's first novel has the claim made for it that: it is also the first novel about. Wellington written by a Wellingtonian. It is a good-sized novel of 257 pages and well bound, while on the cover there is a spirited drawing by Mr. Russell Clark of one of the old New Zealand stage coaches, racing round a bend in a mountain road.

The Wellington of about fifty years j ago is reconstructed and an Irish family of the poorer but more human kind furnishes the characters. The novel *is devoid of sophistication, the, principal theme being the development of Terry, the central character, through his childhood. Dan Mahoneyi Terry's fathei, a real Irishman transplanted to a colonial environment, dis-1 plays every trait that one could wish for. He is sympathetically and naturally treated by the author and is goocihearted, reliable, but full of human weakness up to the end. Cuba Street forty years ago is a subject of which one could write in many strains. Per-1 haps the simple, direct descriptive style has more value than any other; which could have been adopted. There-' is art in the ingenuousness of this method applied to such a narrative, and high lights are.provided by the description of Terry's schooldays. There are many elements in this book: the Irish character, early Wellington, Taranaki, Wairoa, and Timaru. Terry is a queer, sensitive child, his sensitiveness being accentuated by_ a physical imperfection; and his miseries at school are "told with real insight and sympathy and are perhaps the most competent part of the picture. ■ Terry's adventures when he runs away from home, are amusing, and in a way rather pathetic. There is a lot of emotion in the book and a lot of humour. At the end of the book Terry is about sixteen and is in Sydney. His father had been unjust to him and i he had quietly disappeared. The old man, in realising how he had wounded his son, was stricken with remorse at his disappearance, and.the book ends with his wondering whether or not his boy is still alive. - .. . .■ One is left with the feeling that.Mr. Lawlor contemplates a sequel, and seeing that this first novel deals with so short a period of his hero's life, that it perhaps may be a trilogy which he has in contemplation-. Forty years ago Wellington was a small town in which the more human elements were closer to the surface. The country in most cases was wilder than it is today. A picture of the development of New Zealand, and particularly of Wellington and the country round about, it, would be of especial value and there are few. now living who are competent to tell it from the angle which Mr. Lawlor has-chosen. The method is one which has been adopted by the "family novelists" of this century, notably by John Galsworthy, but it has seldom been applied to New Zealand. One of this season's books, "Promenade," by G. B. Lancaster, adopts this method of showing general development from the point of view ,of the single family, but the author there goes back to the beginnings of the settlement of the country for her period and the aristocratic Lovels form a decided contrast to the humble and irrepressible Mahoneys. Mr. Lawlor cannot be congratulated upon having produced a great novel. It is sad, but true in the eyes of most contemporary critics, that no writer who has chosen New Zealand as his subject, can yet be congratulated on that score. Mr. Lawlor can, however, be given full credit for having produced an eminently readable novel containing all the . ingredients of a good story and one which has a decided extrinsic value from the fact that it gives a picture of a phase of life nearly two generations ago in this city, and a picture which has not before presented itself to the eyes of many younger Wellington] ans. RECENT LIBRARY ADDITIONS. Other titles selected from recent accession lists are as follows: —General: "Night Lights," by Sir S. Hicks; "Danger Spots of Europe," by B. Newman; "Fifteen-thirty," by Helen Wills. Fiction: "Concord in Jeopardy," by D. O. Leslie; "Bird Under Glass," by R. JFraser; "A Guest of Life," by N. M. Scanlan.